Middle Tennessee State Univ., Diss.--Murfreesboro, 1992. / Literaturverz. S. [99] - 102.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2005. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 225-238).

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:32:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011-05-31Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:02:24Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 rossi_ad_dr_arafcl.pdf: 1612665 bytes, checksum: 053b9c4cd5ce5c33933f4a76fcbed737 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / A presente tese de doutorado tem por objetivo investigar as questões do Feminismo e da escritura (écriture) na obra Kate Chopin (1850 – 1904), importante nome do Realismo norteamericano, com especial ênfase em seus contos. Em prévia pesquisa de mestrado [A desarticulação do universo patriarcal em The Awakening, de Kate Chopin (2006)] observou-se que o multiverso literário da autora se articula a partir de uma simultânea construção e desarticulação de significações, as quais vão além e ao mesmo tempo se utilizam das estruturas narrativas presentes em cada texto. Assim, Kate Chopin joga com a competência linguística, cultural e ideológica de seu leitor; joga com suas convicções mais profundas, instaurando uma textualidade que transborda as estruturas narrativas, chega ao leitor e o ultrapassa abarcando também o universo social e político. Há nas obras de Chopin, portanto, um trabalho textual que engloba instâncias textuais e sócio-políticas, em um movimento de significação que se encaminha em direção ao que teóricos e filósofos pósestruturalistas chamarão, sobretudo a partir da década de 1960, de escritura (écriture), processo aberto e infinito, ao mesmo tempo gerador e subversor de significados. Recorrendo ao Feminismo anglo-americano, brasileiro e francês, bem como aos pensamentos de Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes e de demais teóricos da escritura como interfaces teóricas, a proposta fundamental desta tese é demonstrar a ilimitada produtividade significativa desse trabalho escritural presente na obra da autora, trabalho este pouco estudado pela crítica especializada em suas obras. Dentro desta perspectiva, o corpus que será objeto de investigação limita-se à contística da autora / This doctorate thesis intends to investigate Feminism and the concept of writing (écriture) in the works of Kate Chopin (1850 – 1904), an important American Realist writer, with especial attention to her short stories. In a previous Master degree research [A desarticulação do universo patriarcal em The Awakening, de Kate Chopin (2006)] it was concluded that the writer’s literary multiverse is carefully crafted in order to simultaneously build and disarticulate significations which go beyond and at the same time make use of the narrative structures in each text. Thus, Kate Chopin plays with the reader’s linguistic, cultural, and ideological competences as well as with his deepest convictions to establish a textuality that overflows the narrative structures, reaches the reader and oversteps him also affecting the social and political universes. In doing so, Chopin’s works present a textual fabric that weaves textual and sociopolitical instances in a meaning production process that can be understood as what poststructuralist theoreticians and philosophers call, mainly from the 1960s on, writing (écriture), an open and infinite process both meaning-generating and meaning-subverting. Having the Anglo-American, Brazilian, and French Feminisms and the thoughts of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and others writing theoreticians as analysis interface, this thesis aims to demonstrate the unlimited signifying productivity of Chopin’s fictional work, an aspect mostly unstudied by her critics. Under this perspective, the research corpus that will be investigated is composed especifically by the writer’s short stories

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:32:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2007Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:07:15Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 silvestre_mac_dr_arafcl.pdf: 1058248 bytes, checksum: e70b578fe0efbfc570ae4b9d956b67f1 (MD5) / Esta tese discute o caráter feminista da obra de Kate Chopin (1851-1904) ao abordar determinados aspectos da condição da mulher do final do século XIX, principalmente no que diz respeito a temas como casamento, família, liberdade, trabalho, submissão e emancipação. A escritora americana levanta questões polêmicas sobre a identidade da mulher, por meio da caracterização das personagens femininas na narrativa, quer em situações ligadas à identidade social, quer em relacionamentos amorosos. Embora, muitas vezes, utilize-se de recursos que, aparentemente, negam uma discussão direta a respeito dessas questões, Kate Chopin acaba revelando seu descontentamento com as opressões sofridas pela mulher, quase sempre associadas às diferenças sexuais e às tradições e cria, para isso, uma estrutura narrativa em que a luta pela identidade feminina se faz presente, seja de forma explícita ou indireta. Além de um estudo aprofundado da temática dos contos, são observados e analisados, entre outras coisas, elementos textuais importantes como o foco narrativo, a caracterização e representação das personagens (principalmente as femininas), bem como as relações de tempo e espaço e o uso da ironia. A crítica literária feminista, mais especificamente a Ginocrítica, que tem Elaine Showalter como principal representante, também faz parte do referencial teórico da tese. / The present study aims to discuss Kate Chopin's (1851-1904) feminist view about some aspects related to the condition of women at the end of the nineteenth century, especially concerning themes such as marriage, family, freedom, work, submission and emancipation. The American writer raises these polemic issues about feminine identity through the character's representation in the narrative, as in situations related to social identity, as when they are involved in love relationships. Although she has often used narrative devices that apparently deny a direct discussion of these questions, Kate Chopin reveals her dissatisfaction with the oppression suffered by women, due to sexual differences and traditional values, creating a narrative structure in which the struggle for a feminine identity is presented, explicitly or implicitly. Thus, besides an analysis of the themes in Chopin's short stories, some important devices are observed, such as point of view, character portrayal (mainly the feminine ones), as well as time and space relations and the use of irony. Feminist criticism, especially Elaine Showalter's Ginocritics, is also used as part of theoretical framework.

Cette recherche a pour but d’identifier une personnalité féminine révisionniste dans le modernisme littéraire américain. Cette personnalité révisionniste a pour nom «American Eve» et défie le «American Adam» qui est un personnage mythique patriarcal de R.W.B. Lewis provenant du dix-neuvième siècle. Cette conceptualisation est accomplie à l’aide d’une analyse socio-critique et comparative des trois protagonistes féminins dans les romans modernes The Awakening (1899) de Kate Chopin, The Sun Also Rises (1926) d’Ernest Hemingway, et The Great Gatsby (1925) de F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ma construction de cette personnalité féminine est divisée en trois chapitres, chacun étant dédié à un protagoniste en particulier. En comparant ces personnages littéraires sur un plan socio-critique et féministe, je permets à mon étude d’établir en quoi les personnages en question contribuent ou ne contribuent pas à la personnalité de «American Eve». Cette approche comparative est un excellent moyen d’évaluer l’évolution du potentiel révisionniste de la femme au vingtième siècle et les différentes façons par lesquelles elle emploie ce pouvoir.

Drowning is a frequent mode of death for female literary characters because of the strong symbolic relationship between female sexuality and water. Drowning has long been a punishment for sexually transgressive women in literature. In the introduction, Chapter 1, I describe the drowning paradigm and analyze drowning scenes in several pre-twentieth century works to establish the tradition which twentieth-century women writers begin to transcend. In Chapter 2, I discuss three of Kate Chopin's works which include drownings, demonstrating her transition from traditional drowning themes in At Fault and “Desiree's Baby” to the drowning in The Awakening, which prefigures the survival of protagonists in later works. I discuss one of these in Chapter 3: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Although Janie must rely on her husband to save her from the flood, she survives, though her husband does not. In Chapter 4, I discuss two stories by Eudora Welty, “Moon Lake” and “The Wide Net.” In “Moon Lake,” Easter nearly drowns as a corollary to her adolescent sexual awakening. Although her resuscitation is a brutal simulation of a rape, Easter survives. “The Wide Net” is a comic story that winks at the drowning woman tradition, showing a young bride who pretends to drown in order to recapture the affections of her husband. Chapter 5 analyzes a set of works by Margaret Atwood. Lady Oracle includes another faked drowning, while “The Whirlpool Rapids” and “Walking on Water” feature a protagonist who feels invulnerable after her near-drowning. The Blind Assassin includes substantial drowning imagery. Chapter 6 discusses current trends in near-drowning fiction, focusing on the river rafting adventure stories of Pam Houston.

<p>This dissertation examines Charles Darwin’s major texts together with literary works by turn-of the-century American women writers—Nella Larsen, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin—in order to trace how evolutionary theory shaped transatlantic cultural ideas of race, particularly black identity, and gender. I focus on the concept of “descent” as the overarching theme organizing categories of the human in evolutionary terms. My perspective and methods—examining race and gender from a black feminist perspective that draws on biopolitics theory, as well as using close reading, affect theory, and attention to narrative in my textual analysis—comprise my argument’s framework. By bringing these perspectives and methods together in my attention to the interplay between Darwinian discourse and American literature, I shed new light on the turn-of-the-century transatlantic exchange between science and culture. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that descent constitutes a central concept and point of tension in evolutionary theory’s inscription of life’s development. I also show how themes of human-animal kinship, the Western binary of rationality and materiality, and reproduction and maternity circulated within this discourse. I contribute to scholarly work relating evolutionist discourse to literature by focusing on American literature: in the context of turn-of-the-century American anxieties about racial and gender hierarchies, the evolutionist paradigm’s configurations of human difference were especially consequential. Moreover, Larsen, Gilman, and Chopin offer responses that reveal this hierarchy’s varied effects on racialized and gendered bodies. I thus demonstrate the significance of examining Darwinian discourse alongside American literature by women writers, an association in need of deeper scholarly attention, especially from a feminist, theoretical perspective. </p><p>This dissertation begins with my application of literary analysis and close reading to Darwin’s major texts in order to uncover how they formed a suggestive foundation for late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century ideologies of race and gender. I use this analysis as the background for my investigation of Larsen’s, Gilman’s, and Chopin’s literary texts. In Chapter 1, I conduct a close reading of Darwin’s articulation of natural selection in <i>The Origin of Species</i>and focus on how Darwin’s syntactical and narrative structure imply evolution as an agential force aimed at linear progress. In Chapter 2, I analyze Darwin’s articulation of the development of race and gender differences in <i>The Descent of Man</i>, as well as Thomas Henry Huxley’s <i>Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature</i>, and argue that Darwin’s and Huxley’s accounts suggest how anxiety over animal-human kinship was alleviated through structuring nonwhite races and women as less developed and hence inferior. In Chapter 3, I argue that Larsen’s novel <i>Quicksand </i>interrogates and complicates aesthetic primitivism and biopolitical racism and sexism, both rooted in evolutionist discourses. Finally, in Chapter 4, I focus on Gilman’s utopian novel <i>Herland</i>and select short stories by Chopin. While Gilman unambiguously advocates for a desexualized white matriarchy, Chopin’s stories waver between support for, and critique of, racial hierarchy. Reading these authors together against the backdrop of white masculine evolutionist theory reveals how this theory roots women as materially bound reproducers of racial hierarchy.</p>

"The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty" examines certain prototypical natures of isolation as recurrent and underlying themes in selected short fiction of Chopin, Porter, and Welty. Despite the differing backgrounds of the three Southern women writers, and despite the variety of issues they treat, the theme of isolation permeates most of their short fiction. I categorize and analyze their short stories by the nature and the treatment of the varieties of isolation. The analysis and comparison of their short stories from this particular perspective enables readers to link the three writers and to acknowledge their artistic talent and grasp of human psychology and situations.